Linguistic prescriptivism may aim to establish a standard language, teach what a particular society perceives as a correct form, or advise on effective communication. If usage preferences are conservative, prescription might appear resistant to language change; if radical, it may produce neologisms.[3][page needed]

Prescriptive approaches to language are often contrasted with descriptive linguistics, which observes and records how language actually is used.[4] The basis of linguistic research is text (corpus) analysis and field study, both of which are descriptive activities. Description, however, may include researchers' observations of their own language usage.

Despite being apparent opposites, prescription and description may inform each other,[3][page needed] as comprehensive descriptive accounts must take speaker preferences into account, and an understanding of how language is actually used is necessary for prescription to be effective.

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The chief aim of linguistic prescription is to specify standard language forms (either generally, as in Standard English, or in style and register) in a way that is easily taught and learned.[5] Prescription may apply to most aspects of language, including spelling, grammar, semantics, pronunciation, syntax, and register.

Standardized languages are useful for inter-regional communication, allowing speakers of divergent dialects to understand a standard language used in broadcasting, for example, more readily than each other's dialects. While such a lingua franca may evolve by itself, the desire to formulate and define it is widespread in most parts of the world. Writers or communicators often adhere to prescriptive rules in the belief it makes their communication clearer and more widely understood[citation needed].

Linguistic prescription may also be used to impose a political ideology. During the second half of the 20th century, politically motivated efforts driven by various advocacy groups had considerable influence on language use under the broad banner of "political correctness". These successfully imposed special rules for anti-sexist, anti-racist or generically anti-discriminatory language (e.g. "people-first language" as advocated by disability rights organizations).

Although lexicographers often see their work as purely descriptive, dictionaries are widely regarded as prescriptive authorities by the community at large. Popular books such as Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003), which argues for stricter adherence to prescriptive punctuation rules, also seek to exert an influence.

Linguistic prescription is regulated formally in some language communities. The Académie française in Paris is a French national body whose recommendations are widely respected though not legally enforceable there. In Germany and the Netherlands, recent[which?] spelling reforms were devised by teams of linguists commissioned by the government then implemented by statute. Some were met with significant political dissent, as was the German orthography reform of 1996.

Other kinds of authorities exist in specific settings, such as publishers establishing a house style specifying preferred spellings or grammatical forms, such as serial commas. Others may be self-appointed advocates whose rules are propagated in the popular press, as in "proper Cantonese pronunciation".

Examples of national prescriptive bodies and initiatives include:

The Académie française, the national language-governing academic body whose recommendations, though legally unenforceable, are respected for maintaining standard French.

The German orthography reform of 1996 for German-speaking Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland, which established statutory national normative spelling usages for each. It has remained so controversial in Schleswig Holstein that the vast majority of voters in a 1998 plebiscite opposed its execution in the Federal State. However, its parliament overruled the decision in 1999. Many major German newspapers chose to only partially implement the reform (e.g. Axel Springer AG, Der Spiegel) or reject it entirely, ending a period where unified German spelling (German: Rechtschreibung, verbatim: right [=correct] writing), although officially only mandatory in government and educational use, was the national de facto standard.

In the Netherlands, standardized spelling norms were compulsory for Dutch government publications — yet popular and mass communications media language applied an adapted spelling reform, see Wordlist of the Dutch language and the White Booklet.

When a culture develops a writing system, orthographic rules for the consistent transcription of linguistic outputs allows for a large number of speakers to understand written communications with minimal difficulty. Linguists largely disregard native writing systems, replacing the conventional symbols of the language they are researching with phonetic transcriptions, but they nonetheless rely on some shared orthographic representation to preserve semantic identities with data sets. This is most commonly achieved by providing the conventional orthographic representation of the English translation of a word alongside the IPA transcription of the word's pronunciation when spoken by a native speaker.

Most, if not all, widely spoken languages demonstrate some degree of social codification in how they conform to prescriptive rules. Linguistic prestige is a central research topic within sociolinguistics. Notions of linguistic prestige apply to different dialects of the same language and also to separate, distinct languages in multilingual regions. Prestige level disparity often leads to diglossia, wherein speakers in certain social contexts consciously choose a prestige language or dialect over a lower, even if is their native tongue.

From the earliest attempts at prescription in classical times grammarians have based their norms on observed prestige use of language. Modern prescriptivist textbooks draw heavily on descriptive linguistic analysis. Because prescription generally manifests itself in the form of prohibitions, new usages are rarely accepted.

Prescription also privileges some existing forms over others, mainly to maximize clarity and precision in language use. Others are subjective judgments of what constitutes good taste. Some reflect the promotion of one class or region within a language community over another, which can become politically controversial.

Prescription can also reflect ethical considerations, as in prohibiting swear words. Words referring to elements of sexuality or toilet hygiene may be regarded as obscene. Blasphemes against religion may be proscribed. In recent decades politically correctness has had a profound censorious effect.[10]

English prescription is sometimes thought[by whom?] to have been based on the norms of Latin grammar. Robert Lowth is frequently cited as having done so, but he specifically objected to "forcing the English under the rules of a foreign Language".[11] It is true that analogies with Latin were sometimes used to buttress arguments, but only in defending an accepted prestige form of English.[citation needed]

Although the standardization of language has an established place in such fields as broadcasting, computer programming, and international commerce, prescriptivism is often subject to criticism. Many linguists, such as Geoffrey Pullum and other posters to Language Log, are highly skeptical of the quality of advice given in many usage guides, including highly regarded books like Strunk and White's Elements of Style.[12] In particular, linguists point out that popular books on English usage written by journalists or novelists (e.g. Simon Heffer's Strictly English : the correct way to write ... and why it matters) often make basic errors in linguistic analysis.[13][14]

One problem is that prescription has a tendency to favour the language of one particular region or social class over others, and thus militates against linguistic diversity.[15] Frequently, a standard dialect is associated with the upper class, for example Great Britain's Received Pronunciation. RP has now lost much of its status as the Anglophone standard, and General American is now an alternative system for English as a foreign language. Although these have a more democratic base, they are still standards that exclude large parts of the English-speaking world: speakers of Scottish English, Hiberno-English, Australian English, or African-American Vernacular English may feel the standard is slanted against them.[16][17] Thus prescription has clear political consequences. In the past, prescription was used consciously as a political tool. Today, prescription usually attempts to avoid this pitfall, but this can be difficult to do.

A second problem with prescription is that prescriptive rules quickly become entrenched and it is difficult to change them when the language changes. Thus, there is a tendency for prescription to be excessively conservative. When in the early 19th century, prescriptive use advised against the split infinitive, the main motivation was that this construction was not in fact a frequent feature of the varieties of English favoured by those prescribing. The prescriptive rule was based on a descriptive observation. Today the construction has become common in most varieties of English, and a prohibition is no longer supported by observation. However, the rule endured long after the justification for it had disappeared. In this way, prescription can appear antithetical to natural language evolution, although this is usually not the intention of those formulating the rules.

A further problem is the difficulty of specifying legitimate criteria. Although prescribing authorities almost invariably have clear ideas about why they make a particular choice, and the choices are therefore seldom entirely arbitrary, they often appear arbitrary to others who do not understand or are not sympathetic to the goals of the authorities. Judgments that seek to resolve ambiguity or increase the ability of the language to make subtle distinctions are easier to defend. Judgments based on the subjective associations of a word are more problematic.

Finally, there is the problem of inappropriate dogmatism. Although competent authorities tend to make careful statements, popular pronouncements on language are apt to condemn. Thus wise prescriptive advice may identify a form as non-standard and suggest that it be used with caution in some contexts. Repeated in the school room, this may become a ruling that the non-standard form is automatically wrong, a view linguists reject. (Linguists may accept that a form is incorrect if it fails to communicate, but not simply because it diverges from a norm.) A classic example from 18th-century England is Robert Lowth's tentative suggestion that preposition stranding in relative clauses sounds colloquial. From this grew a grammatical dogma that a sentence should never end with a preposition.

Samuel Johnson, ca. 1772

For these reasons, some writers argue that linguistic prescription is foolish or futile. Samuel Johnson, commented on the tendency of some prescription to resist language change:

When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation.

With this hope, however, academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders; but their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength. The French language has visibly changed under the inspection of the academy; the stile of Amelot's translation of Father Paul is observed, by Le Courayer to be un peu passé; and no Italian will maintain that the diction of any modern writer is not perceptibly different from that of Boccace, Machiavel, or Caro.

Linguistic prescription is typically contrasted with linguistic description,[4][18] the observation and explanation of how language exists and is actually used. Description establishes conceptual categories and notes grammatical patterns in common use without prescriptive establishment of formal usage rules. It may comment on normative rules without advocating for them. For example, the introduction to the Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1994) reports that, “possible is sometimes considered to be an absolute adjective”, without condemning "more possible" or "less possible" as wrong.

The discipline of modern linguistics originated in the 16th and 17th centuries from comparativelexicography principally concerned with classical languages. The results formed the basis of contemporary linguistics beginning in the 18th and 19th centuries. By the early 20th, descriptive research concentrated primarily upon modern languages.